lördag 21 januari 2017

How do you learn new words? How can we find out more information about a word? How can we support the pupils when thet learn new words? Our pupils need to learn many new words every day
in order for them to understand what they are working with. I wrote earlier about a tool called Visuwords - you can find it under English here on the blog, it is the second tool from the top. Now I want to give you yet another tool that is nice to use together with Visuwords. It is not visual as Visuwords but you get a lot of information about the word you type into the field. THe tool is called Wordnik and it gives you a lot of information about etymologies, meaning and a lot of other information. As I see it you can combine these two. Only our own fantasy sets the limit for what you can do with these. Try them out!

Be the change: Unite for a better internet
... is the theme of Safer Internet Day for 2017. This year it is on the 7th of February and we are all asked to join in and together show the world wht kind of internet we would like to have. How we would like to make it a safer and better place for us all but utmost for our children and young people. Read more on the link above.

Here you can see all the events that will happen of that special day. Be a part of it as well! Join in, register, upload an event tht you lan to do on that day. Maybe as an eTwinning project? THe webpage is updated often now so be sure to pop in often so you do not miss anything. Do you want to know more about Thunderclap?

16 years ago was the day that Wikipedia first entered the internet world. On the webpage Today in history (see the link above) you can read about important things that has happened each day of the year and some days it goes back a thousand years. In 1929 Martin Luther King, Jr was on born on this day,

You can find the search engine that helps you browse through a webpages history and you can see haw it has grown and developed during the years of it's existens.

Have you ever experienced that a digital tool that you like a lot is shut down? Have you had difficulties trying to find a replacement? It is kind of often that the free tools is taken away, gets old, is no longer updated or maintained. It is not fun when a tool that you liked and knew well how to run it stops with its services. The upside is that often you find something even better and that works even easier and is more fun. But it takes time to find them. Therefor I want to give you a link to a site that helps you with that: you just write the tool you want to find an alternative to and you get a lot of different hits. Try it out here:

onsdag 4 januari 2017

I have written about this before in a different way and now I want to emphazise and go deeper in my thoughts about how we need to change teaching and learning in our schools all around the world. Th first thing we need to do is learn to not only accept change I think but also invit it, encourage it and welcome it- it is the one thing we know our children growing up today will meet.

Everything changes so fast around us. New things are invented and evolved. As the technological evolution keeps accelerating we need to adjust and adapt to the change of paradigm that is needed and most of all we need to prepare our children and let them build the key competences they will need to become world citizens when they grow up and being able to take the responsibility needed to build a sustainable society. Thomas and Brown talk about A new learning culture in their book and it is well worth the time it takes to not only read it but also consider how it affects us in our profession. THe book upends our way of looking at teaching and is a mindbender that encourages us to think outside of the box. I totally agree with them concerning why learning is changing in the society and so also in our schools. The most important thing to cultivate within our students is their imagination and keep our minds playful, then we will be creative and can think creational and there will be no limit in what we can achieve. It is time for us to leave the old ways behind and embrace the changes that are already here. It is my strongest believes that we (all teachers and schools in the world) will succed in changing (not adding) our methods and ways of working and our view of learning and start working with blended learning, flipped classroom, open sources, mastery learning, gamified learning, and create learning environments that encourage our students to become curious and motivated. Those learning environments do not have to be at a certain place as I see it it can be anywhere we choose it to be. ICT will be of great help and we will know when we are there bcause our biggest problem will be: What are we going to do with all the time we have on our hands in school, no mor estress, plenty of time to help the students develop their skills for the 21st century. This we will grow into a few steps at the time I am sure, only we will all do it differently, with different approaches and there are no rights and wrongs here. The one thing that we cannot do is stand and watch the world move forward, we have to create this together with not only colleagues, but with our students and colleagues from all over the world. We need to share with each other, learn together and fail together. There is nothing wrong in failing, that is how we learn and develop our skills. To me failing is a success, it shows me new ways to do things, how I can approach them in new ways and what does not work. We find new solutions.

We need to go from fixing a problem to grow a solution. This is exciting, thrilling but also scaring, it is therefor such a relief that we have each other. We do this beacuse we care, we care abut our students and their future. We need to teach the pupils to embrace change and in order to do so we need to become good rolemodels and start embracing changes ourselves. Today. Now. Together...